Eyes open to value of libraries

On Wednesday, city officials opened a branch library at Roosevelt Elementary School. It is one of four school-based branch libraries slated to open across the city as part of a community initiative called One City, One Library.

The libraries will provide students and community members with access to the city's main library holdings of more than 1 million items in all media and for all reading levels. They will be staffed by librarians from the Worcester Public Library and will be open to the public from 3 to 6:30 p.m. and on Saturdays from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.

The undertaking is being driven by a foundation founded by Richard Greene, former Worcester School Committee member and past president of the library board of trustees.

Mr. Greene, one of several dignitaries who attended the opening of the Roosevelt branch library, was understandably pleased with the progress made so far by his foundation.

"A library is the heart of a school, and we are on the road to make it so again," he told me at Wednesday's event.

"It is déjà vu to see it happening again."

During Mr. Greene's tenure on the School Committee from 1966 to 1969, building better library facilities was a top priority for him and his colleagues. Since his departure, however, commitment to school libraries waned, and the headlines over the years tell the story.

In 1975, a million-dollar deficit led to the firing of nine long-term substitute librarians. They were replaced with classroom teachers. In 1982, one of the most telling headlines noted the axing of Ann Spitaels, an elementary school librarian who the previous month had won recognition as the best school librarian in New England that year.

"Taking her out of the library is like taking a surgeon out of the operating room. The scalpel is still there, but there is no way to use it. Take her out of this room and you make the educational tools in here useless."

That refrain has been echoed in different ways by different educators over the years, yet the dismantling of library services in the schools and the city continued.

In 1993, Worcester public school funding for library books dropped from $275,000 to $50,000. The following year the school system froze its funding for library books, and in 2004 eliminated all librarian services.

Little wonder that almost 60 percent of Worcester public school students are failing to read proficiently at the third-grade level.

In recent years, there have been efforts, prior to the present campaign, to stop the skid. Still, there are currently about five Worcester elementary schools without a library and of the others, only three have a librarian.

Thanks to the advocacy of Mr. Greene and others like Patricia Eppinger, who has made it a personal crusade to reintegrate libraries and librarian services into pubic schools, we are seeing a sea change.

The support of institutions such as the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which provided $700,000 for the creation of the four libraries in the pilot program, and leadership of City Manager Mike O'Brien have also been invaluable. While other communities have closed their libraries, Mr. O'Brien has properly and successfully articulated their importance here.

A public library, according to Susan Gately, the Worcester library board president, has always been a place in the community that "embraces everybody."